X8 Background Eraser Unusable

[jglazer]

I am sitting here on a 9000x5000 image trying to erase the background. I dragged my circle all over the image to remove the background and it has yet to update. The process is SOOOOOO SLOOOOOOW compared to previous versions. What's going on here.

...ooo... it just finished. Took about 3 minutes to process the update and it still needs more work. This process used to take about 20 seconds. Is there something I can do to improve it??

[Jean-Luc]

Tried on my system.
When the size of the erasing brush increases, it takes more time to work.
With a 230 pixels brush, erasing is immediate.
With a 1500 pixels brush, it takes approx 20 seconds to work when the brush is moved on a 1500 to 2000 pixels distance.

[hartpaul]

With such a large image and using a large eraser brush (applies to using any brush) it will be slow to apply.

To erase large areas (which I assume you are trying to do) it would be best to use the freehand selection tool with no feather and on Replace mode select the area and hit the Delete key.

An extra advantage of this will be that with the brush you may miss a couple of pixels where the brush does not overlap fully. It also requires many strokes to erase the same area that can be done faster using select and delete.
Then you can use a much smaller brush and zoom in to tidy up the erasing . The right click drag unerase feature still works on the selected and deleted area if you make some overlap mistakes.

[jglazer]

My experience is that using the select tool does not do a good job of blending the tolerances and thus does not generate as smooth of an image. Or am I wrong here?

[hartpaul]

My experience is that using the select tool does not do a good job of blending the tolerances and thus does not generate as smooth of an image. Or am I wrong here?

Not sure what you mean by "blending the tolerances" and generating a smooth image.

My assumption was that on a large image the OP was trying to delete background to isolate one item and that they were erasing large areas. My suggestion for using selections erase was just to use that to erase the largest areas and then to go to the eraser brush for removing the background close to the part they wanted to keep. This would allow a smaller brush and no 3 minute wait.